from "Fancy Hat People or People are Cities (The Haunting of Genesis)": Chapter 1 or Lambs lay eggs
Naomi Beth Tarle

     

Before the beginning—
husk-lined creatures—crafty—
cover their faces with egg-masks and lambs-ear.

Everyone is uniformed or uninformed,
loiters the earth and practices circler-lap-sitting.

Everyone screams out stomach-shaped production lines.

And God says: 'I'm partial to musicals.'
And God divides. And everyone's socks are moist.

They hatch their young from camel eggs
and ride humpbacks through the brush.

Their masks become matted wool and snag their scalloped faces—
they are as wicks and the wool as sulfur and the sand as paper.

God says: 'Let there be fingerlings in the up-spray.'

God uses emoticons and calls out: 'be together in a dry land.'
The dry land is dry, the seas full.

The GCB quarreled with the GPOGP—
bets were taken by the NSF.

Everyone plucks grass blades, as lashes from their lids,
signs up for René's replacement experiments—
and the earth—groomed,
card yielding and toasted around the crust.

Everyone burns the skin off chickpeas to eat the meat.

God says: 'Let there be legumes, nightshades and rock fruit.'
And God makes houseplants and traffic lights,
and sets Petri dishes upon the earth,
and they percolate over the day and over the night,
and small nocturnal-birthing animals are produced.

And God with the 'oh' creates mobs of sea-'n'-land-monsters.

Everyone creeps along the procession and steals fowls guised as foxes.
They keep the birds down their pants or on their heads as modern hats.

God taps out, saying: 'make fruit pies, and depopulate,
and fill the creepers with sea, and let the fowls out.'

Let the earth bring forth the batwing acrostic.

God says: 'These people need instant film.'
And God is alliteration—
calls duck to cattle over all the earth—
then goose as he passes his image, and sprints round the world.

God considers owls:
'Be an owl.
I am salt—take me as grain.
I have crept upon this earth as a shoulder blade of a mountain of green herb,
and it was good.'

 

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